give me
My mate back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.
O rising stars!..."

The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an
agony of apprehension. She looked slowly round at him.

"You haven't answered!" His voice broke over that into a sob. "Will you
marry me, Mary?"

"I don't know," she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream. "I
will if I can. I meant to for a while, I think. But ..."

He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands. "I
ought to be shot," he said. "I'm not fit to touch you--a white thing like
you. I didn't mean to. Not like that. I meant ..."

She stared for an instant, totally at a loss for the meaning--the mere
direction of what he was trying to say. Then, slipping down from the
branch, she took him by the arms. "Don't!" she cried rather wildly.
"Don't talk like that! That's the last impossibility. Listen. I'm going
to tell you why."

But he was not listening for what it might be. He was still morosely
preoccupied with his own crime. He had been a beast! He had bruised, once
more, the white petals of a flower!

It was not that her courage failed. She saw he wouldn't believe. That he
couldn't be made to believe. It was no use. If he looked at her any
longer like that, she would laugh.

She buried her face in her arms and sobbed.

He rose to this crisis handsomely, waited without a word until she was
quiet and then suggested that they go and find Rush and Sylvia. And until
they were upon the point of joining the other pair nothing more was said
that had any bearing on what had happened in the apple tree. But in that
last moment he made a mute appeal for a chance to say another word.

He reminded her that she had said she would marry him if she could. This
was enough for him. More than he deserved. He was going back to the
beginning to try to build anew what his loss of self-control had wrecked.
She need say nothing now. If she'd wait, she'd see.

CHAPTER XIV

A CLAIRVOYANT INTERVAL

It was still May and the North Carolina mountain-side that John Wollaston
looked out upon was at the height of its annual debauch of azalea blooms,
a symphonic romance in the key of rose-color with modulations down to
strawberry and up to a clear singing white. For him though, the invalid,
cushioned and pillowed in an easy chair, a rug over his knees, these
splendors and the perfume of the soft bri